The survey of 1,600 IT professionals worldwide, released last week, was commissioned by ScienceLogic, a hybrid IT monitoring software provider in Reston, Va. While public cloud adoption is expected to continue to grow at a rapid pace, it’s clear that many organizations still aren’t on board. The survey found that:

Eighty-three percent of organizations expect public cloud adoption to increase in the next 12 months.

Sixty-two percent are already using at least once public cloud.

The majority of respondents estimate that up to 25 percent of their IT resources are hosted in a public cloud, while 20 percent estimate that up to half of their IT resources are in a public cloud.

Amazon Web Services (58 percent) and Microsoft Azure (43 percent) are the most popular public cloud providers. Google Cloud is a distant third at 13 percent.

Of the organizations that have not adopted a public cloud, 45 percent cite unclear benefits, and a lack of knowledge required to embrace and successfully implement it. The rest blame security and privacy concerns, point to a lack of business need, or say they simply don’t know why their organization has not adopted a public cloud.

It’s apparent that organizations tend to lack advanced visibility, monitoring and infrastructure control in their public cloud environments. According to the survey:

Eighty-two percent of respondents say they are unable to ensure optimum performance, health, and availability of public cloud workloads due to lack of advanced visibility into the public cloud infrastructure.

Forty-six percent acknowledge that they do not, or don’t know how to, proactively monitor their public cloud workloads.

Sixty-five percent say they feel that IT has less control over the infrastructure in their public cloud environments, compared to that outside of a public cloud environment.

Over 75 percent admit that shadow IT and cloud sprawl are happening within their organizations, whether IT teams like it or not.

Drilling down on the shadow IT issue, the survey asked whether respondents would be aware if business units in their organizations were using public clouds outside of IT's control. In response:

Thirty-one percent say they know about it and accept it.

Twenty-seven percent say they know about it and are trying to stop it.

Twenty-four percent say they know it doesn’t happen in their organizations.

Fifteen percent say they don’t know, and have no way to find out.

Interestingly, 1.5 percent say they’re terrified to ask.

A contributing writer on IT management and career topics with IT Business Edge since 2009, Don Tennant began his technology journalism career in 1990 in Hong Kong, where he served as editor of the Hong Kong edition of Computerworld. After returning to the U.S. in 2000, he became Editor in Chief of the U.S. edition of Computerworld, and later assumed the editorial directorship of Computerworld and InfoWorld. Don was presented with the 2007 Timothy White Award for Editorial Integrity by American Business Media, and he is a recipient of the Jesse H. Neal National Business Journalism Award for editorial excellence in news coverage. Follow him on Twitter @dontennant.

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